February 6, 2013

Jelly Bean now on 13.6% of Android devices, Ice Cream Sandwich at 29%

For a long time now, Gingerbread 2.3 has been the dominant version of Android. More than 50% of devices ran Gingerbread up until recently, despite the OS being years old. Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean are catching up and have taken 29% and 13.6% of the Android pie, respectively. That’s 12.2% on Jelly Bean 4.1 and 1.4% on Jelly Bean 4.2

As the graphic above shows, Jelly Bean and Ice Cream Sandwich are running on more and more devices. There are a variety of reasons for this. People are buying newer devices running the newer operating systems. Sony’s 2011 Xperia line up have all been updated to ICS along with other older devices like the HTC Thunderbolt. A very small percentage can even be attributed to rooted devices running updated custom ROMs. So it’s really been a group effort getting things up to date.

Despite some great advances by Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean, Gingerbread still remains on top with a commanding 45.6%. These numbers are down from prior measurements and are continuing to trend that way. Nevertheless, it is a little sad that a 2 year old version of the OS is still dominate. Of course, this means that fragmentation continues to be a problem for Android.